


A Certain Comfort

by dreams_for_spring



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Jon Snow and the Starks Are Not Related, Jon and Sansa are dating, Romantic Fluff, Very mild hurt/comfort vibes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:34:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22207198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreams_for_spring/pseuds/dreams_for_spring
Summary: She looks around the apartment, at the plain white walls that look just a little more welcoming in the dancing yellow candlelight. In a few short months, these walls will be covered with their own pictures and paintings, and the rooms will be filled with furniture and knick-knacks, and all the small things that will make this so much more than just the four walls that confine it.Someday everything will change once more, but a part of her wishes that they could stay here, like this forever.--It’s Jon and Sansa’s first night in their new apartment together. Sansa reflects on all the things that brought them here, to this moment where they both have found their home in each other.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 22
Kudos: 103





	A Certain Comfort

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick oneshot I couldn't get out of my head, even though there is a mountain of work threatening to collapse over top of me 😬
> 
> My first apartment was less than 300 square feet and even though it was a broken down mess, I still love it even now, because it was the first time I got something that I felt was truly mine... So I guess this is an ode to that.

Sansa is sitting on the rough wood floor of her new apartment – of their first apartment – and even though the only piece of furniture they own is a small nightstand that used to sit in her old dormitory, she is happier than she has ever been in her life. Even though tonight she’ll be sleeping on a leaky old air mattress with lumpy pillows and an old musty duvet, the smile on her face persists – or maybe it exists because of it all; because of the lumpy pillows and old wood floor and the man sitting across from her, smiling back at her as if she is the sun and he is happy to simply exist within her orbit.

No man in the world has ever made her feel like this – not Harry, not Joffrey, not the handful of other boys whose faces blur together now, after all these years. _There is no one else in the world like Jon_ , she thinks, because it is impossible to believe that the world could possibly have created another man as kind and careful with her heart as him. No, he is an anomaly, and she is just lucky to have finally noticed him, lucky that no other woman saw him for who he is before she did.

Jon looks at her across the nightstand that they are using as a table. Shadows dance across his face, making his eyes look wide and dark as ink in the low light afforded by the dozen or so candles that Sansa has lit, because the power won’t be hooked up until tomorrow. His head is tilted slightly, and he has that arresting, lopsided smile of his plastered on his face – the one that has haunted her memories for the better part of a decade.

She had always tried her best to ignore it, to push everything she felt for him down, though she can’t say now why that ever had seemed the right thing to do. This right here is the right thing, if such a thing could ever exist.

She’s sure of it when she looks at his soft, kiss-bruised lips and dishevelled mess of hair, still mussed from earlier this evening when they broke in the apartment first on the leaky air mattress, then later in the small shower that couldn’t seem to get hot enough to stop them shivering against each other. She was sure of it when he had dutifully followed the spreading trail of gooseflesh across her arms and down her chest and stomach in an attempt to warm her up, and had instead set her body to flame. Pretty soon after that, neither of them had cared about the water or anything at all other than each other's pleasure, and how to maneuver their bodies so that neither of them slipped and fell.

Even now, her body is still buzzing from him, a pleasant ache residing between her thighs – one that threatens to turn to want once more if he keeps looking at her like this, with hungry eyes and that dangerous mouth. She looks away as she licks her lips, wondering if his are as chapped and bruised as hers, and she muses that if it were possible to be drunk on kisses she would be incoherent right now, because in the past 6 hours since they’ve been given the keys they’ve done nothing but drink each other in like addicts. 

So now that they’re both too tired to do anything else – at least for now – they are sitting around this makeshift table for their first dinner together, and it feels like she is home for the first time in more than a decade. If she is a small boat alone on the ocean, he is the tide bringing her to shore, strong and sure and certain. He leans over the table and gives her yet another kiss that she can feel through her entire body, toes curling, lips tingling, making her sure this is the best day of her life so far.

From today onwards she is no longer alone, they will always have each other. There is a certain, welcoming comfort to know that she’ll wake up each and every morning to his quiet snores, to his arms round her middle, and his feet intertwined with her own. She hopes she’ll give him that same comfort in turn.

Along with that though is the relief that she will no longer need to double and triple check the locks and deadbolts on the door, will no longer need to close and lock the windows even in the dead heat of summer. From this moment forward, she is _safe_ , with Jon. It’s no longer Sansa Stark against a world filled with people who seem to only want to use her for her name – her father’s name. Now, it's them together, and the world can take a turn to bend to them for awhile.

She takes a small sip from the chipped mug filled with cheap bodega sparkling wine. Even though it’s almost sickly sweet, it’s easy enough to pretend it’s the finest champagne with the way Jon’s looking back at her, grinning from behind his own mug.

Nothing else matters now, because they have each other together in this first apartment that they will share, and grow, and make a life from.

So maybe it’s even better that they are sitting cross-legged on the wood floor with cheap wine, toasting each other with old chipped Winterfell University mugs that Jon pilfered from his dormitory kitchen – because it’s a beginning.

They are stripped of everything that has come before this, free from their pain and their pasts. It’s as though they are reborn, fresh and clean and new, skin bright pink and soft as a newborn babe. It’s all so perfect that even the flaws seem to be essential to this – like jagged puzzle pieces forming a smooth round picture – and Sansa can feel tears beginning to well in her eyes.

Those tears slowly make a trail down her cheeks when she thinks of all the things that brought them here to this moment – but she knows they are tears of joy and thankfulness, not of sorrow.

She is thankful that they get to build everything together, from scratch. She’s thankful to be rid of everything that sought to ruin her. Gone are all the fairweather friends that listened to the gossip and rumours. Gone is the professor and his lingering touches that made her sick to her stomach. Gone is her vindictive ex-best friend Margaery, and her ex-boyfriend Joffrey. Even though it gutted her at the time, she’s thankful now that they found each other and finally left her behind – that she’ll never have to wake up again to a dorm room door with a broken lock and the word _whore_ written on it in black sharpie.

Her stomach flips a little as she thinks back on the painful memory of it, and how no matter how hard she had tried to scrub it off, it had remained there, indelible. She remembers the looks that other students had given her as they walked by, and the frenetic fear that had built up within her chest as though this one word, this one action by another would now define her life.

She remembers how in a moment of desperation she had messaged Jon, and despite all her suspicions of how much he must have hated her, he had come anyway. He had left his class right in the middle of it, run across campus with a bottle of acetone he’d borrowed from the chemistry department, and wiped it off for her. He never asked, never pushed – she knows now he never would, it’s not in his nature.

When she’d looked in those eyes that day – filled with a quiet indignation – she’d wondered what he must have thought of her, of why Robb’s younger sister was being given the modern equivalent of the Scarlet Letter. Her cheeks had flushed a deep red of embarrassment, but when he’d asked her if everything was okay, it was because of the way he asked – soft and kind and without agenda, a way so foreign to her – that she had completely broken down and told him everything. It was then that she learned his indignation wasn’t towards her, but towards a world that seemed intent on hurting her.

Later that evening when they had both lain in the small twin bed of her dorm room, when he’d held her wrapped in his arms and against his warm body, and she’d been more comfortable than she’d ever been in her entire life, she had finally realized it. When her heart felt too large for her chest and thrummed against her rib cage insistently, when his fingers intertwined with her own and the emptiness within her finally melted away – she’d known it had been Jon all along and would be for the rest of her life.

From that moment forward when she thought of Jon, she no longer thought of him as Robb’s aloof friend with the downcast face and furrowed brow. Instead, she pictured the creases that formed in the corners of his eyes when she made him laugh, imagined the way his beard scratched against her cheeks, her stomach, and her thighs as he kissed every square inch of her body, and remembered the way he told her he'd protect her with such conviction she'd never since doubted it.

That night and every night since when they lie in the dark together with their hands held tight together, when he tells her about all the things that led him to come to her that day, she is sure that fate exists – if only because we create it, shape it, mold it from the chaos that marks our lives.

Jon looks at her tears and his eyebrows furrow slightly. He reaches a hand to her cheek and brushes the wetness away with the rough pad of his thumb.

“Is everything okay, Sans?” He murmurs, letting his hand cradle her cheek, taking the weight from her head just as he has taken away so many other burdens.

Sansa smiles again and bites at her lip as she pulls away from his hand and reaches for a piece of pizza from the box that sits precariously on the small table.

She wants tonight to be about them and their lives together, not about her and the past. From this moment on, they’ll shoulder their burdens together.

“It’s perfect,” she says lowly, voice still hoarse from earlier, throat choked up with more impending tears.

Jon rewards her with another soft smile, one that makes her heart skip a beat, makes her wish that the world could be like this forever – just the two of them, safe and warm and happy.

He grabs his own piece of pizza and takes a big bite from it, and she can tell that he’s just as content as she is. She wonders if he knows that she’d move mountains to make him as happy as he has made her. She promises herself that she will try every day for the rest of her life to love him just as he loves her.

She looks around the apartment, at the plain white walls that look just a little more welcoming in the dancing yellow candlelight. In a few short months, these walls will be covered with their own pictures and paintings, and the rooms will be filled with furniture and knick-knacks, and all the small things that will make this so much more than just the four walls that confine it.

Every night when they go to bed together, she’ll remember how it felt to lie on that soft air mattress beside Jon, to let her head sink down onto the lumpy pillow and watch the shadows from outside move along the walls because they couldn’t yet afford curtains or blinds.

She knows that someday everything will change once more, but a part of her wishes that they could stay here, like this forever.

Even though it’s small and old and maybe not so very clean, she loves this apartment all the same because it’s theirs, and it’s home.


End file.
